1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus capable of reprinting image data once printed, and an image forming system.
2. Description of the Related Art
When carrying out reprinting such that image data created by a PC (Personal Computer) or the like is inputted into an image forming apparatus such as a printer to be printed once and the image data is printed again, there is a method wherein image data is stored on a recording medium and desired image data is read from the recording medium to carrying out reprinting. However, since a capacity of the image data is very large, it is necessary to use a large-capacity recording medium such as a USB (Universal Serial Bus) memory as the recording medium. In addition, in recent years, there has been general atmosphere that does not permit to take out information by recording the image data on a general media, such as a USB, which can be read by anyone, from a viewpoint of protecting secret information.
Hence, an image forming system is proposed, that image data is integrally managed by a document management system and desired image data is acquired from the document management system so that the image data can be reprinted by an image forming apparatus. Examples of such an image forming system include following two systems. In a first type of image forming system, when an image forming apparatus that has received an instruction to reprint image data reads desired image data, the image forming apparatus logs into the document management system, and, based on indexes applied to image data, searches and acquires the desired image data by a detecting section from a plurality of sets of image data stored in an image data saving storage. In a second type of image forming system, an ID (identification) for identifying a user is issued from the document management system. The second type of image forming system will hereinafter be described with reference to the drawing.
FIG. 6 is a view showing the structure of an image forming system 200 in a related art. In the image forming system 200, a plurality of image forming apparatuses 201, 202, and 203 are connected through a network 208 to a document management system 209. The document management system 209 is a system that provides IDs to a plurality of sets of image data inputted from an image inputting apparatus 205 to manage integrally. The document management system 209 is configured by having an image data ID management server 206 for managing an ID applied to each image data, and an image data saving storage 207 for storing image data. For example, in the image forming apparatus 201, desired image data is read from the image data saving storage 207, the image forming apparatus 201 transmits an ID inputted by an ID input console 204 through the network 208 to the document management system 209. The document management system 209 that has received the ID collates the received ID with IDs managed in the image data ID management server 206, takes out the specified image data from the image data saving storage 207, and transmits the image data through the network 208 to the image forming apparatus 201. When receiving the image data transmitted from the document management system 209 as described above, the image forming apparatus 201 is able to read and reprint the desired image data.
Furthermore, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication JP-A 2004-126607 discloses an image forming system wherein a plurality of image forming apparatuses are connected to each other through a network and image data read by an optional image forming apparatus can be transferred to a different image forming apparatus to output.
The image forming system disclosed in JP-A 2004-126607 is configured so that image data inputted by an arbitrary image forming apparatus can be output by a different image forming apparatus. However, JP-A 2004-126607 does not describe the structure in which image data once printed can be reprinted. Moreover, not only the image forming system 200 requires the document management system 209 for integrally managing a plurality of sets of image data, but also each of the image forming apparatuses 201, 202, and 203 also requires a server system for integrally managing IDs.